[Snake]

Silence has a lot of counterplay that it's not even relevant anymore. Heron Feather or Throatopener get rid of this weapon and put its next inflict on a "4 round cooldown" due to the latest changes to it if you have forgotten. You can also just simply have Critical Evade or be a Black Knight to fully halt Tsukikage's attempts at having any importance with its current bad scaling. You can stop the enemy from attacking you, but not only they can shrug it off but your attempts at damaging them will be nil anyway, thanks to the poor scaling.

Burn only works to cripple people who stack Bonus DEF and as I have said, the damage it does is pathetic as the LV is a mere 15 that can also work against you if the enemy absorbs fire damage somehow, and thanks to Volcanic everyone's packing Fire Resistance anyway. So basically it just has any significant effect against Mage tanks.

When you build to hit with any weapon but bows and guns, your SWA is gimped to 50 and even then the weapon's stats egg on your attempt to build. Here's a prime couple of examples of the reason why any argument that STR is optimal for daggers falls flat for assassin-like builds:

Daggers (Stock)



Tamacc Shurikens



Bakaga Shurikens



Touyaa Shurikens



Ninshi Shurikens



Paragi Shurikens



Stingers



Daggers of Bleeding



Creed Replicas



Suzaku Tessens



Byakko Tessens



Seiryuu Tessens (The Meta pair)



Hikage and Tsukikage



Thief Blade (Funny STR Daggers)



Magnifying Glasses



Vorpal Fang and Dancing Shiv (Classic duo)



Atlaua's Abaniko and Eternal Solitude




Can you spot the reason why it's always the same daggers we see being used in actual PvE and PvP that are not people trying to crack jokes at how bad they are? Seiryuu Tessen. Vorpal Fang. Dancing Shiv. Atlaua's Abaniko (which good lord I just saw how good it is now), even flippin' Magnifying Glasses passed the test there. Magnifying Glasses, dude. And no one can say neither of these weapons mentioned have 'no strong and significant effects'.

Seiryuu Tessen does 100% Elemental ATK in combination of Wind and Lightning together, which ignores protection too, plus the highest SWA possible out of all daggers in existence.
Vorpal Fang has a 25% chance of negating DEF+Armor with backstabs.
Dancing Shiv is a safer Vorpal Fang that cripples 12 DEF for several rounds.
Atlaua's Abaniko has range, same effect as Tsukikage with no 'grace period' (iirc?), and even Luckiness Dance which buffs THE WHOLE PARTY.
Magnifying Glasses has a damn awesome Revenge potential that allows you to annihilate whoever drew first blood.

I question further why shouldn't Hikage and Tsukikage, and for instance, the rest of these damn daggers to fall in line with them. It's either that or nerfing the 'big ol' five' presented so all daggers are trash-tier together because they got 'special effects tied to them', I guess? Iunno anymore.

SL2 doesn't give much flexibility on building if you're a basic hitter, just saying. No way you can have STR in any scaling without shooting yourself in the foot. Also pay close attention to my HP and VIT spending.


(This was also the base of my build's items, just to add more. All traits and talents that influence combat have also been spent.)

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Then adding to that, there's an attempt at making Hikage/Tsukikage work by completely ashing my HP and other stuff. The SWA is just -grazing- by the other options mentioned above that need no STR. And I barely even have GUI to amplify said damage properly! It's an absurd.